When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, much was made of the "peace dividend" and liberals in both parties wasted no time trimming down our military.
The move to take money away from one of the few areas authorized by the Constitution (national defense) and spend it on social programs (that are not authorized by the Constitution) was well under way when Bill Clinton came to the White House and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
When the planes flew into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, many people realized we'd cut too much, that the world really wasn't full of peace and love as we'd been told.
Since 911, we've had to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, even as we've maintained our military commitments around the world, providing a deterrent to threats like China and North Korea.
But the War on Terror is far from over, and Iran is close to developing nuclear weapons. The communist Chinese have been spending tons on building up their military, and plan to increase spending by 17%. Meanwhile, they're threatening free Taiwan, our ally.
Any reasonable person would probably agree that the world is not a safe place, and now is not a time to reduce our already strained military any further; if anything, we should increase spending on more troops and hardware (aging F-15s?) right away.
So why is one of the Democrat presidential candidates stumping loudly for drastic cuts in our defenses?
A video of Barak Obama has come to light, and in it, he advocates cutting defense spending, slowing the development of new weapons systems, and undermining our new ballistic missile defense system.
You can find a laundry-list of Obama's daisy-haired plans to gut national defense at MissleThreat.com. More analysis can be found at CNS News, where Heritage Foundation national security research fellow Baker Spring says of Obama's peace-and-love plan: "It strikes me as a little bizarre, to put it mildly."
Obama also floats the liberal pipe-dream of a world without nuclear weapons. There might actually be a very slight possibility of such a thing...if a fully effective ballistic missile defense system were in place. But our system is not fully functional yet, and Obama's already talking about cutting the legs out from under it.
Nuclear weapons are a Pandora's Box that, once it was opened in 1945, it can never be closed again. Even keeping the "Nuclear Club" membership frozen is hard enough, as Iran's efforts to get nukes illustrate. I doubt that liberals like Obama have changed much since the Cold War, when they wanted the United States to unilaterally disarm...while dangerous countries around the world had a loaded gun to our head.
Does Obama even realize that defense spending constitutes less than 18% of our budget? Does he realize that 44% of our budget goes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid--programs our Constitution DO NOT AUTHORIZE?
What kind of an upside-down world have we made for ourselves where we spend more than twice as much for things that aren't legal according to our Constitution than we do on protecting our country from foreign aggression? And a presidential candidate wants to cut defense spending even further?!
Watch this video and see what you think. Even if you're a fairly level-headed Democrat, do you really think a guy like this needs to be at the helm of the most powerful nation on earth--a nation that all the bad guys are itching to take down?
Technorati tags: defense, military, Obama, election
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Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Obama Pledges to Gut National Defense
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